[crossfire] weather, lattitude, town location, and the world

[Brendan Lally]

On 11/12/05, Mark Wedel <
     mwedel at sonic.net
     > wrote:
>
       Crossfire
     >
      is somewhat limited by only 1 aspect of terrain is available (we don't have
     >
      forested mountains for example).
     
Forested mountains could exist in principle, it just requires someone
to be able to draw alpine trees.

>
        All that said, if we were to create another continent and wanted to start with
     >
      an automatic process, there are many improvments I can think of:
     >
     
     >
      1) Create altitude map (with different seed of course) like did before.
     
Actually, I think it might be preferable to create tectonic plate
boundaries, and then generate heights from that, it would give a much
greater concentration of mountains, without having them scattered
everywhere (and impeding movement)

It would also be more realistic.

>
      2) Based on that altitude map, run weather on it for a long time (elevation <0
     >
      is of course see).
     
The problem with that is that the same results aren't guarenteed, so
if this is done once, and a mistake is made with a heightmap somewhere
(a big mountain in the centre of navar, say) it could be difficult to
run the weathermap to the same effect again after fixing it.

>
      Water has to go somewhere, so that determines rivers,
     >
      lakes, and marshes (lakes would basically be formed when the total water flowing
     >
      into a set of spaces is above some amount and that set of space(s) is
     >
      constrained by higher objects around that would hold the water.
     
This would also be limited by temperature, at lower temperatures, the
amount of inflowing water needed is less, because less evaporation
occurs. (this is a major part of the reason why there are so many
lakes in scandinava).

>
        Mountains should probably be determined if the elevation is above some height.
     >
        But low mountains are also possible, but that should be done based on
     >
      different of elevation of neighboring spaces - if a space is say 1000' different
     >
      in elevation from its neighbors, it is a mountain.
     >
     
     >
        similar for mountains, but no height - just height difference (in the 250-500'
     >
      range?).
     
Well, if the surrounding area is high, and there is a line of low
altitude, then you get a canyon, if the surrounding land is low, and
there is a line of high altitude, then you get a mountain ridge.